Blog Links Jan 17: The Impacts of Sisters and of no Siblings; Pre-school education; sensitive measurement, and more…

·A new paper in Science looks at the impacts of China’s one-child policy on personality, finding people born after the introduction of the policy were, not only less trusting, less trustworthy, and more pessimistic, but also less competitive, less conscientious, and more risk-averse. See this coverage in the The Scientist.

·The causal impact of having a sister is apparently to make men more politically conservative in terms of gender attitudes (via Andres Marroquin’s blog).

·Depressing news from a randomized experiment assessing America’s Head Start program which provides pre-school to disadvantaged kids – no measureable effects in the new follow-up data after some positive effects were found immediately after the program – as covered in the Brookings blog.

·From the annals of sensitive measurement: The Guardian describes how a randomized response technique was used to elicit information from Welsh farmers about whether they had killed badgers – a more unusual example of a method that is often used in other social science research to find out about illicit behavior.

·If you are looking for different development datasets, as well as the World Bank’s Open Data platform, it is worth looking at Markus Eberhardt’s website which now links to over 250 macro datasets (as well as some micro datasets).